There's bad magic and good magic.
Good magic is when you finally manage to quit smoking and something cool happens to you the same week--like winning twenty bucks on a lottery ticket. Bad magic is when someone quotes your latest poem in a movie about clumsy people, then you fall into an open sewer and die. Someone, somewhere, said comedy was a little like that. I think it might have been Mel Brooks. Life is like that, too. Cool and cruel. Strange and simple. Full of lessons that hammer home important truths and oozing with evil shit that just doesn't make any sense at all. And sometimes it gets even stranger.
Case in Point:
Earlier this year, I wrote a book called BLACK LIGHT in collaboration with a couple of swell guys named Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan. It's about a supernatural private eye named Buck Carlsbad who vomits up ghosts. (Trust me, it's cool.) When "the boys" and I were first brainstorming Buck's adventures, the impetus was always on making things as interesting and original as possible, within the framework of a traditional thriller/ghost story. Old chestnuts jazzed up with a few new bells and whistles. I'm a big fan of eighties glam metal. Patrick used to live down the street from Don Dokken. They say write what you know, yes? It seemed like a natural idea to make our hero a relic of the headbanger decade, an ancient walkman filled with killer tunes attached to his waist and his head lodged firmly in the past. It seemed even cooler to give Buck a poltergeist sidekick who would give him constant shit about his "lousy taste" in music. We decided in our further infinite wisdom that Buck's constant plight would be summed up in a particularly popular tune from the era, entitled "Down Boys."
It was the luck of the draw, really. I'd been on a bit of a Warrant kick during the writing of BLACK LIGHT, though none of us had much cared for the band back in the actual day. They were the 'second wave' of mega-hyped, overproduced MTV hairspray rockers who floated in on the heels of groundbreakers like AC/DC, Judas Priest, Motley Crue and Van Halen, and not many people in the "hardcore" crowd took them very seriously. Even I have deeper obsessions, and Patrick and Marcus tend to have more "serious" music on their minds most of the time.
But.
"Down Boys" fit the condition of Buck Carlsbad.
It worked for him.
The song had a catchy riff, some lyrics that almost fit. It had nothing to do with ghosts at all, but it seemed apropos in a weird, lifeworn way. It was cheese and dated and was guaranteed to bring a guilty smile to the face of any baby boomer or eighties irony addict who read our book. We referenced the tune overtly in the text of BLACK LIGHT--and we even named one of the chapters WHERE THE DOWN BOYS GO, which was a reference to dead people coming to rest in Buck's abandoned funeral home/graveyard. It became a sort of theme within the story that helped (we hoped) to define the character and shade his struggle to become human, after a lifetime of banishing unsettled spirits into the netherworlds. It is for the objective reader and/or critic to decide whether we succeeded or failed in this endeavor . . . but the endeavor was sincere. That's the point. We weren't making a joke about some silly music everyone hates. We made our character an appreciator of something out of time because we thought it made him work harder in a world that didn't understand him in the first place. Also, it's real loud, and real loud music on a set of headphones distracts a guy like Buck from all the voices nobody else can hear. He doesn't Metallica because they're "depressing."
"Down Boys" was one of many songs written by Warrant's frontman Jani Lane that expressed his disillusionment with life and love. Sure, it was run through the pop metal machine of the day, candy-apple slick in all it's glammy glory, with a happy chorus that sounds (as we describe it in the book) like 'hot chicks with big embarrassing eighties-dos playing volleyball on a beach, circa 1987.' But it has a certain heart. And, though it is a close cousin to "Cherry Pie," at least it ain't "Cherry Pie"--a song written in literally one day to please the record company, when Jani's southern redneck revenge ballad "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was deemed too confrontational to be a single from their second album. (Their first album was called "Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich," by the way, which may provide a certain further insight into such behind-the-scenes struggles.)
"Cherry Pie," of course, is what Jani Lane will be remembered for in infamy. The song. The video. Jani's hilarious and heartbreaking VH1 interview fifteen years later in which he nearly wept on camera, telling the world: "I could shoot myself in the fucking head for writing that song." That was long after Jani himself had descended into the bizarre limbo of almost Elvis-like self-parody, haunting occasional reunion concerts and making the odd stop-off at reality shows such as Celebrity Fit Club. It's a sign of the times and perhaps even "bad magic" that such former flash-in-the-pan celebrities attached to brilliantly shining and utterly embarrassing flameout moments in pop culture history have been transformed into tragic punchlines on hipster blogs and quirky reference points in books written by guys like us, who remember when it all kinda meant something to someone. Even if it was just irony commenting on irony, badly disguised as commercial art.
But for those who are interested in redemption, the story has an almost happy ending.
Several years after "Cherry Pie" debuted at number one, sealing Warrant's fame and fate in the same instant, they went in the studio with Beau Hill--producer of Ratt, Winger and even Alice Cooper--and came out with something called "Ultraphobic," an album full of heartfelt, ass-stomping Jani Lane originals designed to win new fans and defy the hipsters. And nobody bought it at all. Because who wants to buy an album by Warrant, right? Still . . . you should check the album out if you ever saw that VH1 interview. It's Jani's true answer to his harshest critics and one of the most underrated rock albums of 1995. Does that sound impossible in a watershed year dominated by everyone from Radiohead and Green Day to Prince and Alanis Morrisette? Just check the tunes out. I promise it rocks. Not in an ironic way. In a real way. Much of "Ultraphobic" was on constant iPod rotation in my house as we competed the final polishes and copy-edits on BLACK LIGHT.
Our book was finally in the can and less than two months from hitting the street when Jani Lane was found dead in a motel in Los Angeles.
He was forty-seven.
There was a scrap of paper in his pocket that read simply I AM JANI LANE.
Bad magic or good magic? Tragic coincidence, bitter irony or Just Plain Weird?
You decide.
We're a little speechless, actually.
Meanwhile . . . we'd like to pay our respects. They're in the book, too. Read it. We're not being cute. Buck Carlsbad likes "Down Boys" because it downs out the ghosts, and we like Jani Lane because, like all tragic rockers, his story leaves us something to laugh about, something to cry about . . . and a lot to think about.
Our original intention was not to have a dedication page at the front of BLACK LIGHT. We couldn't come up with a name that made sense, and one or two of us just think that kind of "shout-out" thing is silly and unnecessary, at least in certain circumstances. (Though it is quite traditional in publishing.) I'm convinced now that the real reason we couldn't make up our minds was that . . . somehow . . . we knew the book was meant to be dedicated to Jani. In a way, it already was. The page with his name in memoriam will appear in any future editions. That is as it should be.
Meanwhile, here I am, telling you a sort of ghost story.
Maybe you'll get some "good magic" out of it somehow. Like perhaps you'll get a halfway decent parking space today at the exact moment a song you like comes on the radio. We hope it'll be enough to sit in your car a few extra minutes and enjoy the whole thing, while you ponder the golly-gee-whiz super cosmic meaning of it all. Rock it hard, folks. We only live once. Maybe.
For Jani Lane.
By Stephen Romano